Clocks That Have Been Ticking Since Before the Revolution

This Lotus Esprit being auctioned in London portrayed a morphing amphibious vehicle in “The Spy Who Loved Me.”Credit
Tim Scott

TICKING SINCE BEFORE

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Peter Stretch, an 18th-century clockmaker in Philadelphia, left only wisps of evidence of his family life and career.

Scholars have searched mostly in vain for paperwork from his workshop and newspaper accounts of his prolific output of chiming clocks in walnut and mahogany cases.

“He fell right in the middle of this sort of black hole of information,” Frank L. Hohmann III, a clock collector and historian, said in an interview at his Manhattan home, where clocks all around tick not quite in synchrony.

In collaboration with the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, Mr. Hohmann has published “Stretch: America’s First Family of Clockmakers.” Mr. Hohmann and his co-author, the historian Donald L. Fennimore, spent nearly a decade on the project. They traveled from England to Alaska tracking down about 140 surviving Stretch clocks. They pieced together biographical scraps suggesting heroism, philanthropy, frugality, fame and alcoholism in the Stretch clan.

“We wanted a kind of human quality to the story,” Mr. Fennimore said in a phone interview.

Stretch, a Quaker from a hamlet in Staffordshire, England, brought along his tools when he settled in Philadelphia around 1702 with his wife, Margery, and four small children. The family arrived highly recommended by their British church congregation.

“We could have been glad to have had their company here,” friends and relatives wrote in a letter that survives in a Staffordshire archive.

Peter and Margery became role models for Philadelphians. They gave advice to unmarried Quakers about maintaining “moderation or modesty” in budding love affairs. The couple donated money to widows, orphans and victims of house fires and kidnappings by Indians. For elite customers, Peter Stretch built brass clocks with multiple dials that tracked the time and moon phases. The dials were surrounded by metal cherubs and crowns. The carved wooden clock cases mostly came from the Philadelphia cabinetmaker John Head, a fellow English Quaker émigré. (Head’s account books, rediscovered in a Philadelphia archive in 1999, have page after page listing transactions with Stretch.)

Photo

Works from a Peter Stretch clock built in the 1720s.Credit
Laszlo Bodo

The clockmaker’s workshop was so renowned that its address, at the intersection of Second and Chestnut Streets, was known as Stretch’s Corner. His buyers flaunted the clocks in their finest parlors, and the survival rate is high. A few of the antiques still belong to his clients’ descendants, and two-thirds of perhaps 200 made in Stretch’s career have been identified, sometimes with handwritten notes attached describing their travels over the centuries.

Stretch died in 1746, and the workshop from Stretch’s Corner outlived him by a few decades, but in the hands of less upstanding children and grandchildren. Quaker records scold one of his sons for “unchaste freedom before Marriage” and condemn a grandson for neglecting his trade and family while “Drinking Strong liquors to Excess.”

The new book is rich in geeky clock terms like “collared winding holes” and “deadbeat escapement.” The clocks were disassembled for photography, to expose their guts. (CDs with hundreds more images are available through Mr. Fennimore at rustiemetalman@yahoo.com.)

When Mr. Fennimore alerted owners to any damage and alterations he discovered in the machinery, and possible misattributions to Stretch, “they were not happy with me, but I look on that as part of my responsibility,” he said.

He and Mr. Hohmann studied clocks in museum back rooms, including a 1730s walnut piece that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put on view partly dismantled in its Americana storage cases. Numerous works in the book only recently came on the market. They typically bring five-figure prices, although in 2004 Winterthur paid almost $1.7 million at Sotheby’s in New York for a mahogany Stretch about nine feet tall.

“Peter Stretch has this rather singular position of recognition, both in his time and since then,” Philip H. Bradley, a dealer in Downingtown, Pa., specializing in clocks, said in a phone interview. Kelly Kinzle, an Americana dealer in New Oxford, Pa., said in a phone interview that finding the best Stretch pieces required patience.

A great clock can stay in one collection for decades, never published or exhibited. The owners’ mind-set, Mr. Kinzle said, is, “I’m going to be dead before it ever gets sold.”

Photo

A 1730s Peter Stretch clock with walnut case.Credit
Laszlo Bodo

LOTUS, AHOY!

Seven white sports cars were modified and battered to produce a few minutes of underwater battle footage in the 1977 James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me.” The cars, various versions of a Lotus Esprit, were used to represent a single 007 car as it swerves along cliffs in Sardinia to avoid villains, soars off a pier into the sea, morphs into a submarine, kills bad guys, resurfaces on a crowded beach and turns back into a car.

The one vehicle that had substantial screen time actually functioned as a submarine, with a former Navy SEAL wearing diving equipment at the helm. Its interior was full of water, wires and apparatus, rather than the comfy dark upholstery and colorful controls Bond enjoyed.

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After the movie was released, the undrivable Lotus appeared at a few car shows, then ended up abandoned in a Long Island storage unit. The contents were sold in 1989 for about $100.

On Sept. 9, RM Auctions in London will offer the submarine Lotus with a $1 million estimate. A few other cars used in the underwater sequence are still traceable; the National Motor Museum in England and the Dezer Collection in North Miami each have one on view.

Related props turn up, too. A pair of license plates for one of the cars brought $3,600 at Christie’s in London in June.

Engineers have speculated that the car’s machinery could be made serviceable again, but RM has not tried submerging it.

“We’re making no claims about its underwater worthiness today,” Don Rose, an RM car specialist, said.

Nor is it likely that the Lotus can be adapted for the road. “It has a plate, just for continuity,” he said, “but it’s not actually registered as a car.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 23, 2013, on Page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: Clocks That Have Been Ticking Since Before the Revolution. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe